PARIS CONSECRATES A REPOSITORY FOR ITS DEAD BENEATH THE EARTH

PARIS, 7 April 1786, 1786-04-07. — The ancient quarries of the Tombe-Issoire, south of the crowded centre of this capital, have this day been consecrated as a repository for human remains. Ground formerly worked for building-stone is thus assigned a new and solemn office: to receive the bones removed from the burial-ground of the Holy Innocents. The undertaking joins the authority of the police, the labours of the quarry engineers, and the observances of the Church. Its object is not another ordinary cemetery, with fresh graves opened beside dwelling-houses, but a common resting-place beneath the earth for the accumulated dead of an overburdened district.

M. Thiroux de Crosne, Lieutenant-General of Police, has carried forward the measure, while the preparation of the underground workings falls within the charge of M. Charles-Axel Guillaumot, Inspector-General of Quarries. The distinction between their offices is material. An order to empty a cemetery does not itself provide a safe place for what must be removed. Passages must be examined, the condition of the workings understood, and access provided for a labour unlike the ordinary business of either the gravedigger or the quarryman. Today's religious ceremony gives the chosen destination the character required for the reception of Christian remains.

The Innocents stands amid a quarter in which the business of the living has pressed closely upon the ground allotted to the dead. Near Les Halles, houses, shops, streets and the cemetery have long occupied the same confined neighbourhood. Burials repeated through centuries have made the place something more formidable than its extent upon a plan would suggest. Common graves and the charnel-houses surrounding the ground have received successive generations. There is no simple remedy by which more earth can continually be found within the same enclosure, while the houses about it remain inhabited and the neighbouring markets continue their trade.

The danger ceased to be merely a subject for learned dispute when, in 1780, the failure of a boundary wall exposed adjoining cellars to the contents of the burial-ground. The cemetery was closed that year. Yet the prohibition of new interments left the earlier accumulation in place: closing a gate could not remove what lay behind it. The Council of State's decision of 9 November last directed the removal and evacuation of the Innocents. The present undertaking therefore answers a difficulty left unresolved by closure, and supplies a destination without which an order for clearance would have been of little practical effect.

The Crown has already declared its concern with burial in places frequented by the living. Its declaration of 10 March 1776 opened its prohibition of interment within churches with the words, here rendered in English, ‘No ecclesiastical or lay person, of whatever quality, estate or dignity’. Exceptions were expressly retained for certain ecclesiastical dignitaries and persons possessing specified rights. The same declaration addressed cemeteries injurious to ‘the healthfulness of the air’. Those provisions did not command the particular work consecrated today, but they show that the separation of habitation and burial has become a matter of royal administration, not merely a private complaint.

There is, nevertheless, an important difference between forbidding a future burial and disturbing one already made. At the Innocents, remains must be taken from ground long held sacred and conveyed to another resting-place. Ecclesiastical observance is therefore no ornament to the proceedings. It answers the question of whether removal for the convenience and health of a city can be reconciled with the respect owing to its dead. The consecration of the receiving ground maintains that distinction: the bones are not to be treated as common refuse because their former lodging has become intolerable to the neighbouring inhabitants.

The choice of quarries also brings the business within a branch of public service established to confront another of the capital's subterranean troubles. Since 1777, the Inspection of Quarries has been charged with examining and securing old workings beneath Paris and its approaches. Cavities left by the extraction of stone may be forgotten above ground while remaining dangerous below it. M. Guillaumot's experience belongs directly to this difficulty. The new repository makes use of an existing excavation, but its suitability cannot be judged solely by the room it offers. The condition of the stone and the means of reaching the chosen galleries are equally consequential.

For the inhabitants and traders about the Innocents, the immediate interest lies in the removal of a burden from a densely occupied quarter. The market draws provisions, customers and carriers into streets where burial has claimed a substantial enclosure. Clearance may alter the uses to which that ground can be put, but the first task is neither embellishment nor speculation: it is the evacuation ordered by the authorities. No estimate of future commercial advantage can stand in place of that work. Its benefits to the neighbourhood depend upon the actual removal of the remains, not merely upon the declaration that the cemetery is closed.

The political significance is equally plain. The police are acting upon a condition inherited from many generations, and one intertwined with religious custom, neighbouring property and the ordinary supply of the city. A single household cannot remedy it; nor can a parish, acting alone, select and prepare extensive underground workings elsewhere. The enterprise requires different authorities to perform successive parts of one design. The Crown's concern for public health, the police direction of the clearance, the engineer's examination of the receiving place, and the Church's consecration are all brought to bear upon the same undertaking.

The labour ahead is considerable, and today's ceremony must not be mistaken for its completion. Human remains accumulated over centuries cannot be removed with the dispatch of merchandise from a warehouse. Excavation, collection, conveyance and deposition must follow one another, while due order is maintained at both the old burial-ground and the new repository. Nor does the selection of an underground destination abolish the need for care there. The very purpose of the arrangement requires that the receiving galleries remain fit for their assigned office. The authorities have provided a place and sanctioned its use; execution must now make that provision effective.

Paris thus begins a deliberate separation of two necessities which have too long contended for the same ground: accommodation for the living and an enduring resting-place for the dead. Stone taken from beneath the city helped to build its streets and houses; an exhausted portion of those workings is now entrusted with what the crowded surface can no longer conveniently retain. Whether the removal proceeds with the order and reverence intended will be the immediate test. This day's act is a solemn commencement, committing the capital to a work whose success must be measured below ground as well as above it.